[lbo-talk] My Letter To CH

Carl G. Estabrook galliher at illinois.edu
Mon Dec 19 11:51:50 PST 2011


De mortuis, perhapas, but Alex and Glenn Greenwald remind us of the destructive role Hitchens did indeed play:

<http://www.salon.com/2011/12/17/christohper_hitchens_and_the_protocol_for_public_figure_deaths/singleton/

>.

OTOH, Alex' brother writes an affecting reminiscence of their personal relations, to see that the good is not interred with the bones:

<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-death-of-a-freethinker-6278359.html

>.

--CGE

On Dec 19, 2011, at 11:41 AM, <dperrin at comcast.net> <dperrin at comcast.net> wrote:


> Whoops. Thought this was offlist. Ah well. My point stands.
>
> Dennis
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: dperrin at comcast.net
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Sent: Monday, December 19, 2011 12:36:58 PM
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] My Letter To CH
>
> Thanks. Alex used to write glowingly of Hitchens, defending him
> against detractors, etc. Once they split, then Alex decided that he
> never liked Hitchens. Typical of him.
>
> Dennis
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: davidchachere at yahoo.com
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Sent: Saturday, December 17, 2011 2:46:42 PM
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] My Letter To CH
>
> alexander cockburn's eulogy of CH
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
>
> Farewell to C.H.
> by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
> I can’t count the times, down the years, that after some new
> outrage friends would call me and ask, “What happened to Christopher
> Hitchens?” – the inquiry premised on some supposed change in Hitchens,
> often presumed to have started in the period he tried to put his close
> friend Blumenthal behind bars for imputed perjury. My answer was that
> Christopher had been pretty much the same package since the
> beginning —
> always allowing for the ravages of entropy as the years passed.
> As so often with friends and former friends, it’s a matter of what
> you’re prepared to put up with and for how long. I met him in New York
> in the early 1980s and all the long-term political and indeed personal
> traits were visible enough. I never thought of him as at all
> radical. He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest
> expression when
> he elected to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen by Bush’s director of
> Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. In basic philosophical take
> he always seemed to me to hold as his central premise a profound
> belief
> in the therapeutic properties of capitalism and empire. He was an
> instinctive flagwagger and remained so. He wrote some really awful
> stuff in the early 90s about how indigenous peoples — Indians in the
> Americas — were inevitably going to be rolled over by the wheels of
> Progress and should not be mourned.
> On the plane of weekly columns in the late eighties and nineties it
> mostly seemed to be a matter of what was currently obsessing him: for
> years in the 1980s he wrote scores of columns for The Nation,
> charging that the Republicans had stolen the 1980s election by the
> “October surprise”, denying Carter the advantage of a hostage release.
> He got rather boring. Then in the 90s he got a bee in his bonnet about
> Clinton which developed into full-blown obsessive megalomania: the
> dream that he, Hitchens, would be the one to seize the time and
> finish off
> Bill. Why did Bill — a zealous and fairly efficient executive of
> Empire
> – bother Hitchens so much? I’m not sure. He used to hint that Clinton
> had behaved abominably to some woman he, Hitchens, knew. Actually I
> think he’d got to that moment in life when he was asking himself if he
> could make a difference. He obviously thought he could, and so he
> sloshed his way across his own personal Rubicon and tried to topple
> Clinton via betrayal of his close friendship with Sid Blumenthal, whom
> he did his best to ruin financially (lawyers’ fees) and get sent to
> prison for perjury.
> Since then it was all pretty predictable, down to his role as
> flagwagger for Bush. I guess the lowest of a number of low points was
> when he went to the White House to give a cheerleading speech on the
> eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I think he knew long, long before
> that
> this is where he would end up, as a right-wing codger. He used to go
> on, back in the Eighties, about sodden old wrecks like John Braine,
> who’d
> ended up more or less where Hitchens got to, trumpeting away about
> “Islamo-fascism” like a Cheltenham colonel in some ancient Punch
> cartoon. I used to warn my friends at New Left Review and Verso in
> the early 90s who were happy to make money off Hitchens’
> books on Mother Teresa and the like that they should watch out, but
> they didn’t and then kept asking ten years later, What happened?
> Anyway, between the two of them, my sympathies were always with
> Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who
> would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from
> Mother Teresa. Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the
> snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity.
> One awful piece of opportunism on Hitchens’ part was his decision to
> attack Edward Said just before his death, and then for good measure
> again in his obituary. With his attacks on Edward, especially the
> final
> post mortem, Hitchens couldn’t even claim the pretense of despising a
> corrupt presidency, a rapist and liar or any of the other things he
> called Clinton. That final attack on Said was purely for attention–
> which fuelled his other attacks but this one most starkly because of
> the
> absence of any high principle to invoke. Here he decided both to
> bask in his former friend’s fame, recalling the little moments that
> made it
> clear he was intimate with the man, and to put himself at the center
> of
> the spotlight by taking his old friend down a few notches. In a career
> of awful moves, that was one of the worst. He also rounded on Gore
> Vidal who had done so much to promote his career as dauphin of
> contrarianism.
> He courted the label “contrarian”, but if the word is to have any
> muscle, it surely must imply the expression of dangerous opinions.
> Hitchens never wrote anything truly discommoding to respectable
> opinion
> and if he had he would never have enjoyed so long a billet at Vanity
> Fair. Attacking God? The big battles on that issue were fought one,
> two, even five hundred years ago when they burned Giordano Bruno at
> the stake in
> the Campo de’ Fiore. A contrarian these days would be someone who
> staunchly argued for the existence of a Supreme Being. He was
> for America’s wars. I thought he was relatively solid on
> Israel/Palestine, but there too he trimmed. The Jewish Telegraphic
> Agency put out a friendly obit, noting that “despite his rejection of
> religious precepts, Hitchens would make a point of telling
> interviewers
> that according to halacha, he was Jewish” and noting his suggestion
> that Walt and Mearsheimer might be anti-Semitic, also his sliming of a
> boatload of pro-Palestinian activists aiming to breach Israel’s
> blockade of the Gaza Strip. (His brother Peter and other researchers
> used to say that in terms of blood lineage, the Hitchens boys’
> Jewishness was
> pretty slim and fell far outside the definitions of the Nuremberg
> laws. I always liked Noam Chomsky’s crack to me when Christopher
> announced in Grand Street that he was a Jew: “From anti-Semite to
> self-hating Jew, all in one day.”)
> As a writer his prose was limited in range. In extempore speeches
> and arguments he was quick on his feet. I remember affectionately many
> jovial sessions from years ago, in his early days at The Nation. I
> found the Hitchens cult of recent years entirely mystifying. He
> endured his final ordeal with pluck, sustained indomitably by his wife
> Carol.On Dec 17, 2011, at 10:02 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
>> I wondered. My bad for assuming the person who was a friend and needs
>> to mourn was you. I guess the only person is Doug? Beats me, I don't
>> read everyone on the list.
>
> I don't need to mourn. I am annoyed by people who cheered his death,
> of which I've seen several instances. I also don't like that people
> find nothing sad or tragic about what happened to him in the last 10
> years of his life. But people can be as rude as they like. It's a
> free country, ha ha.
>
> Doug
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